NYAB Event - “Korea – Floating Worlds” Exhibition

“Korea – Floating Worlds” Exhibition

Shin Gallery

This event has ended.

SHIN GALLERY presents a group show, Korea – Floating Worlds, presenting three Korean artists that create worlds that appear suspended in space and time. Today, Korean artists are pushing the envelope in every respect to express their individual creativity, to have a voice. The artists employ traditional materials and techniques in creating modern imagery or they develop new techniques to create contemporary works. The three artists in this group show create very different worlds all seemingly suspended in a space and time warp. Hyon Gyon Park paints female shamans who in Korean culture were mediators between the spirit and human worlds. She paints vibrantly colored shamans with swirling forms of traditional objects and windswept hair to create the feeling of the spiritual energy that surrounds them. The artist uses melted satin on panel in some paintings to create the vivid imagery. The shamans appear in movement across the canvas. Seungpyo Hong experiments with old techniques to create new visions. He uses traditional Korean materials and ancient Chinese calligraphy to replicate words on panels. The artist describes his work, “…the characters elude classification as purely literary. Language is merged with image as the characters take on the visual appearance of their meanings. Thus the signifier becomes that which is signified.” Again, the characters appear in a world not hampered by gravity. Ji Ho-Jun combines his skills as both an artist and a scientist to create digital works of photographs of coins. He uses both an electron microscope and a scanning electron microscope to produce images that are then juxtaposed. He says that when we look at objects with our naked eye there is a limit to what we can see. He is interested in the microscopic and unseen image of an object. “The microscope reveals a whole world unknown to us, where what we know about an object can be questioned because the image seen is unrecognizable. Juxtaposing these two different images of a coin gives a glimpse of how things are not always as they seem. People confine themselves within certain boundaries and have certain ideas about the world,” says the artist.

[Image: Hyon Gyon Park “Untitled” (2009) Cloth and Silicon on Panel 70.9 x 177.2 in.]